White House Pushes Tech Industry to Shut Down Market for Abusive AI Deepfakes

Arati Prabhakar, left photo, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jennifer Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, are shown in 2023 file photos. Klein and Prabhakar are co-authors of a Thursday announcement calling on the tech industry and financial institutions to commit to new measures to curb the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual imagery. (AP Photo, file)
Arati Prabhakar, left photo, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jennifer Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, are shown in 2023 file photos. Klein and Prabhakar are co-authors of a Thursday announcement calling on the tech industry and financial institutions to commit to new measures to curb the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual imagery. (AP Photo, file)
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White House Pushes Tech Industry to Shut Down Market for Abusive AI Deepfakes

Arati Prabhakar, left photo, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jennifer Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, are shown in 2023 file photos. Klein and Prabhakar are co-authors of a Thursday announcement calling on the tech industry and financial institutions to commit to new measures to curb the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual imagery. (AP Photo, file)
Arati Prabhakar, left photo, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jennifer Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, are shown in 2023 file photos. Klein and Prabhakar are co-authors of a Thursday announcement calling on the tech industry and financial institutions to commit to new measures to curb the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual imagery. (AP Photo, file)

President Joe Biden's administration is pushing the tech industry and financial institutions to shut down a growing market of abusive sexual images made with artificial intelligence technology.

New generative AI tools have made it easy to transform someone's likeness into a sexually explicit AI deepfake and share those realistic images across chatrooms or social media. The victims — be they celebrities or children — have little recourse to stop it, The AP reported.

The White House is putting out a call Thursday looking for voluntary cooperation from companies in the absence of federal legislation. By committing to a set of specific measures, officials hope the private sector can curb the creation, spread and monetization of such nonconsensual AI images, including explicit images of children.

“As generative AI broke on the scene, everyone was speculating about where the first real harms would come. And I think we have the answer,” said Biden's chief science adviser Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.

She described to The Associated Press a “phenomenal acceleration” of nonconsensual imagery fueled by AI tools and largely targeting women and girls in a way that can upend their lives.

“We’ve seen an acceleration because of generative AI that’s moving really fast. And the fastest thing that can happen is for companies to step up and take responsibility.”

A document shared with AP ahead of its Thursday release calls for action from not just AI developers but payment processors, financial institutions, cloud computing providers, search engines and the gatekeepers — namely Apple and Google — that control what makes it onto mobile app stores.

The private sector should step up to “disrupt the monetization” of image-based sexual abuse, restricting payment access particularly to sites that advertise explicit images of minors, the administration said.

Prabhakar said many payment platforms and financial institutions already say that they won't support the kinds of businesses promoting abusive imagery.

“But sometimes it’s not enforced; sometimes they don’t have those terms of service,” she said. “And so that’s an example of something that could be done much more rigorously.”

Cloud service providers and mobile app stores could also “curb web services and mobile applications that are marketed for the purpose of creating or altering sexual images without individuals’ consent," the document says.

And whether it is AI-generated or a real nude photo put on the internet, survivors should more easily be able to get online platforms to remove them.

The most widely known victim of deepfake images is Taylor Swift, whose ardent fanbase fought back in January when abusive AI-generated images of the singer-songwriter began circulating on social media. Microsoft promised to strengthen its safeguards after some of the Swift images were traced to its AI visual design tool.

A growing number of schools in the US and elsewhere are also grappling with AI-generated deepfake photos depicting their students. In some cases, fellow teenagers were found to be creating AI-manipulated images and sharing them with classmates.



OpenAI Appoints Former Top US Cyberwarrior Paul Nakasone to its Board of Directors

OpenAI showed off the latest update to its artificial intelligence model, which can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people’s moods. - The AP.
OpenAI showed off the latest update to its artificial intelligence model, which can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people’s moods. - The AP.
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OpenAI Appoints Former Top US Cyberwarrior Paul Nakasone to its Board of Directors

OpenAI showed off the latest update to its artificial intelligence model, which can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people’s moods. - The AP.
OpenAI showed off the latest update to its artificial intelligence model, which can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people’s moods. - The AP.

OpenAI has appointed a former top US cyberwarrior and intelligence official to its board of directors, saying he will help protect the ChatGPT maker from “increasingly sophisticated bad actors.”

Retired Army Gen. Paul Nakasone was the commander of US Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency before stepping down earlier this year.

He joins an OpenAI board of directors that's still picking up new members after upheaval at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company forced a reset of the board's leadership last year. The previous board had abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman and then was itself replaced as he returned to his CEO role days later, Reuters.

OpenAI reinstated Altman to its board of directors in March and said it had “full confidence” in his leadership after the conclusion of an outside investigation into the company’s turmoil. OpenAI's board is technically a nonprofit but also governs its rapidly growing business.

Nakasone is also joining OpenAI's new safety and security committee — a group that's supposed to advise the full board on “critical safety and security decisions” for its projects and operations. The safety group replaced an earlier safety team that was disbanded after several of its leaders quit.

Nakasone was already leading the Army branch of US Cyber Command when then-President Donald Trump in 2018 picked him to be director of the NSA, one of the nation's top intelligence posts, and head of US Cyber Command. He maintained the dual roles when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. He retired in February.